Debrief: Sid Sackson's Acquire

Sid Sackson's 1963 classic board game Acquire completely surprised us as our favorite game from the World Series of Board Gaming, offering deep economic strategy that outshines Monopoly through elegant stock market manipulation and hotel chain development.

• Simple yet strategic tile placement game about building and merging hotel chains
• Developed in 1963 but still feels modern and engaging in its latest 2023 edition
• Players place tiles representing city blocks to create and expand hotel chains
• When chains merge, majority shareholders receive substantial bonuses
• Each turn involves placing one tile and buying up to three stocks
• Hotel stocks increase in value as chains grow larger
• Game ends when a chain reaches 41 tiles or when mergers are no longer possible
• Perfect game for people who enjoy economic games but want more strategic depth
• Can be played open-handed (showing stocks) or closed-handed for different experiences
• Surprisingly accessible despite its economic depth - can be taught in minutes

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome Back from World Series
• 1:21 Introducing Acquire (1963)
• 2:41 How Acquire Works
• 6:26 Clayton's Perspective on Gameplay
• 9:05 Strategy and Player Dynamics
• 15:24 Final Thoughts on Acquire

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:13

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. Back and better than ever, and we are back from the World Series of Board Gaming. We did a brief episode live in person where we talked about some of the games we played, but we do want to go a little deeper into some of those games because we really enjoyed them and we want to talk more about them. Joining me as always is my co-host and co-captain of the ship, Clayton Gable. How are you doing, Clay?

SPEAKER_00: 0:39

I'm doing great. Uh, World Series of Board Gaming last weekend was awesome. It was a whirlwind, but we're back and we're reinvigorated about board game. I don't know about you, but that really jolted some life into me. Oh, yeah. I mean, it took some life out of me because I mean, we're all old men now, so staying up till 1 a.m. is like a historic feat for us. So, you know, it definitely took it out of me, but it also reinvigorated me. So I'm excited to talk about some of these games with you guys.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10

That's right. We've been on a real tear lately. I don't know if you know this. Uh, we've been talking about all the hottest games out there, the newest, the hottest games from 2016 and previous. Today we've got another brand new, hot new game to talk to you about coming to you from the year 1963. Acquire by Sid Saxon. Uh, this game has been published many times over uh by many different publishers, 3M, Avalon Hill, etc. But Acquire was first developed in 1963. So if you're watching the YouTube video and I clicked through some of these images, some of them are going to be the old version, uh, but we played the most recent version, which was published in 2023. And uh I I really enjoyed this. This might have been my favorite game that we played at World Series Board Gaming. Kind of caught me by surprise. It was nice going into it, not knowing a lot about it. I had heard people mention this in the past, uh, but kind of a surprise. Uh, we get to learn it from one of the best there is, uh, Foo. Foo, if you're listening to this or you're watching this YouTube video. Uh Fu is like the Singaporean champion of a choir, and we learned from him personally. He kind of stood over our shoulders and taught us the game as we went along. Uh, people were really excited to come up and watch this game, let alone teach it. And really, what this game is is a uh tile placement, stock market manipulation type game based on running hotel chains. And so the uh goal at the end of the game, once everything is resolved uh and the end game conditions have been triggered, is to have the most amount of money in your hands after you sell off all your stocks. You get these stocks by placing out these little cubes, these little tiles that represent uh blocks in a city, basically. Here's the very old version if you're watching the YouTube video. But you place these blocks out here, you have six of them, seven, Clay?

SPEAKER_00: 3:13

Six in your hand, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 3:14

Yeah, six in your hand, and on your turn, you are placing one of these blocks. Anytime two of them are orthogonally adjacent to one another, like here we have five E and T that are right next to each other, uh, or five E and Five F, uh, it triggers the creation of a hotel chain. And so you will take one of the hotels that are worth like really uh it's kind of a sliding scale. There's like the very expensive hotels, there's the budget hotels, there's like kind of a middle mid-range hotel. You take one of those, you place it on there, and then as the founder of that hotel chain, you take one of those stocks, and the stocks are these kind of uh funny, money-looking uh cards, basically. Yeah, they're just cards, they're just cards. You take a card from that hotel chain, and uh then you have these kind of sliding scale. I'm trying to see if I can find a picture of that sliding scale.

SPEAKER_00: 4:07

Um it's basically like a spreadsheet that tells you the values of everything. If you have how big the hotel is dictates how much the stock for that hotel costs. So it's it's kind of like a little spreadsheet player aid that keeps track of each hotel size and whether it's the low grade, medium grade, or high high-end hotel. And that kind of is where you go to see how much stocks are going to cost when you buy and sell them.

SPEAKER_01: 4:37

That's right. And so as you continue to add blocks or these little tiles to the existing hotel chains, those stocks are worth more money because the bigger their footprint grows, the more money those stocks are worth. When two of the existing hotel chains touch one another or a block is put between them, uh, the larger of the two hotel chains will absorb the smaller one and be worth a lot more. Um, anything that gets above 11 blocks is like unabsorbable. And then once a block reaches 41 squares, uh, 41 squares. I don't know why I said it like that. Once it reaches 41 squares, uh, the end game is triggered, and then you're kind of cashing in all of your stocks and uh and seeing how much money you have at the end. The person with the most amount of money wins. Uh, there's a little bit of luck involved because the tiles that you draw are random, but you feel like you have a lot of agency when you place them out on your turn because you can choose, pick and choose which uh hotel block you want to add to. Obviously, you would like to add to one that you own a lot of the uh hotel stocks of. Um, but sometimes you hit really have no choice depending on what tiles you drew. They're all face down in this kind of pool, and as you draw back up to six in between your turns, uh you might get you know ones that don't help you a whole lot. Um and then after you have played your turn, you have the opportunity to buy stocks up to three of any of the existing hotel chains. It could be one that you own, could be one that you uh don't own, um, could be one that you created or not. You're just buying three up to three stocks uh of any hotel, and then when that hotel is absorbed, you are trading those stocks in for either stocks of the new larger company or you're trading it in for cash that then you can swap later on. It's a lot of money changing hands every single turn, uh, but you feel like you have a little bit of agency in this game to be able to strategically swap those stocks. Maybe I hold on to these because then when that hotel comes back out, uh it'll be worth a lot of money later on. Um, Clay, I uh you haven't talked a lot yet. Let's what what did you think about acquire?

SPEAKER_00: 6:55

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I I was blown away by this game. I thought it was just some old crusty monopoly, like offshoot, but this is so much more than that. It was amazing the feeling you get when you have, you know, like when you they call it the primary and secondary shareholders. So you're the primary shareholder in a company and it gets bought up by a bigger company. If you have the majority of the shares in that company, you get a nice fat bonus based on a whole slew of things, how big the company is, you know, the that stuff. So when you see that a company that you know you got a lot of stock in, and you can place the tile that's gonna get that company merged into by a bigger company, and you're about to get a big payday, you're gonna get that bonus and you're gonna get more money. And then what I really liked was yeah, it's kind of random. You have six tiles, so you're limited by that, but you can always buy stock in whatever you want. Yeah, so every turn you can decide whether you want to buy stock in that, you know, huge company that's got stock selling for$10,000 a share, or you want to invest in the nice new startup that could be worth a lot at the end if it doesn't get gobbled up right away. Um, so that was really cool. Like the red hotel chain, when it came out, it was selling for you know$2,000 a share. So people who got in on that ground floor of that red hotel chain at the end of the game, that ended up being our biggest hotel chain. And I think everybody who had shares in that at the end of the game were able to turn those in for$10,000 or more dollars per share. Yeah, so it's interesting, but that wouldn't have worked out like that if a different merger happened and the red had got swallowed up earlier in the game. So there's just so many interesting dynamics at play on this board. And I learned so much from my buddies over my shoulder, you know, kind of walking me through it. But this game, yeah, I biggest surprise for me. It was something I had little interest in, really. But we saw it sitting there and we were like, you know what? This is Sid Saxon, it's a classic. I thought it would be pretty light on the rules. So it was a good choice for first thing on Saturday morning, I guess it was. And it really is pretty light on the rules. I mean, on your turn, you place a tile, and if there's a merger, you oh, you either form a new hotel chain if you want to, if there's a merger, you do the merger, which can be it's not that tedious. I mean, you basically just deal out shareholder bonuses and then turn in your stocks for money. Yeah. And then at the end of every turn, you buy three stocks. Like that's the whole game. Every turn you got those three steps and it hums along pretty smooth. The spreadsheeting of it kind of was hard. At some times, you're like, okay, so I have stock in the blue company, that's the middle column, and it has 15 squares to it. It's 15 squares big, so it's five thousand dollars a share. So, like at the end of every turn, when you're trying to buy stock, it's kind of like, okay, what's going on? Yeah, but yeah, but yeah, that's that's kind of where I stood on this one.

SPEAKER_01: 10:16

Yeah, I feel like three might be the way to play it at three players because we ended up in this weird situation, and you mentioned the red hotel. That's just our instance for our game, the one time that we played it. But the red hotel started out, it was maybe the first hotel formed, and then it absorbed another hotel, and then another hotel, and all of a sudden, like you're at 11 squares before any other hotel had reached like maybe five. And yeah, if you bought in early, that was great for you. But then we continued to buy up those shares until there was none left, and it was above 11 squares, so it could not be absorbed. So there was literally no way else to get in on that hotel, and any tile that I had to place that then like merged another hotel with that one was only helping you guys who had the majority of the shares. And we played open-handed. Sometimes you can play this close-handed where nobody knows what shares other people have. You're kind of doing some mental math in your head to know who is the majority shareholder. We played open-handed. I know that you guys have the most. And so, like, fighting to not play those tiles that would help you guys absorb other hotels was really like painstaking. I think we might have missed a rule somewhere where like you can swap tiles out if you don't if you don't want to play them or you can't play them or something.

SPEAKER_00: 11:33

Um, yeah, yeah, we didn't do that until the end. Like, if if you have tiles that you can't play, you can set them aside and draw new tiles at the end of your turn.

SPEAKER_01: 11:42

That's right. Yeah. And but I I was kind of torn. Like towards the end, I was kind of like, maybe I can just continue to stand up new hotels and knock them over and get them absorbed as fast as possible. So that way I'm getting a share, like an ownership bonus, and then getting them absorbed, swapping that in for more money, and maybe I can like just kind of short this hotel over and over and over again. Um, I don't know the economics behind that, but it seemed like a good strategy in the end game. Uh, and it didn't really pan out for me because I think I lost by a long shot. But man, what a surprise game! Like, did not expect this one to be on the radar at all, did not expect this one to be a highlight with all the other cool games that they have at these conventions and the deep library of Dice Tower West. Did not expect this to be on my radar as as much as it was, and then this ended up being probably my favorite game we played this weekend.

SPEAKER_00: 12:38

I will say, again, we've only played it once, but it did feel it did, yeah, it did feel like, and I was the beneficiary of this because I had my own personal coaching staff, but it did feel like once you kind of got ahead of steam, and this is kind of like real life too, people like once you start getting a lot of money, it becomes hard to stop. Like money makes more money, and once you sell the right stuff and get get into that first pot of cash, like then I could buy the stock I wanted in all the other companies, and then you know, those just appreciated over time. And yeah, it I think I don't know, probably with a more competitive group that stayed a little closer together. Again, I had a lot of help, so it felt like I got off to a blazing start, and I never felt like I was unable to buy what I wanted and do what I wanted, and so it was just about making the right plays and buying the right stock. And it could feel bad if you're Travis or Jared and you kind of see somebody that's just rolling in dough, and you're like, Well, there's not much I can do at this point.

SPEAKER_01: 13:47

You know, they're they're clearly uh the slum lord here, but really what you're trying to do is like once somebody starts to move ahead like that, and this this dynamic might change if you played it close-handed, where if we didn't know that you were the majority shareholder in half of these hotels, we might be able to play things a little bit differently. But like, I felt like a race to try and build up hotels as fast as possible just to compete with the red one that we knew that you were the majority shareholder in, right? So, like, if if we could play to these ones over here, whether we're absorbing new hotels or forming new hotels or like just building to existing ones, build them up as fast as possible so that the red one cannot absorb it and trigger end game, right? We want to keep this going as long as possible. And we ended up in this situation at the end where we had just a couple of hotels that were kind of floating around the outside edges. The big red hotel owned like half of the board, and then any place we went was going to trigger the end game. Like there was maybe what three other locations that we could have played, yeah, at the very end. Yeah, and then there was the one that was going to trigger the end game, and I think you ended up tipping us over the edge for end game, but yeah, like you get to a point where it's not beneficial to anybody else to keep playing, so just like end it and be done with it.

SPEAKER_00: 15:05

Yeah, there was just such nuanced decisions that I wasn't expecting. Like in at the beginning, before I started having a coaching crew, I was doing silly things that made sense to me. I would, you know, be like, all right, I have some I have some of the blue hotel. I've got some continental in my hand. So on my turn, I'm gonna play a tile that makes blue bigger, and I'm gonna buy more blue. Yeah, but it doesn't make sense to make a hotel bigger, make the stock more expensive, and then buy it. Like, yeah, so maybe I make my hotel chain bigger and then buy some of a cheaper hotel that looks like it's getting close to being absorbed somewhere else. So there's just a lot of cool decisions to be made and ways to just stack cash and stack stocks.

SPEAKER_01: 15:48

Yeah, I I love that you hit on that decision because that was one that I was like kind of wringing my hands about while we were playing was you place your tile and then you are able to buy stock. So I can't buy the stock up and then make it a little bit more expensive afterwards. So yeah, I ended up in these situations where I'm like, man, I I really want to buy that stock, but the only ones that I can play are to that specific hotel chain, which is gonna make it more expensive after I play the tile. Uh yeah, what a what a cool game. I there's probably such deep strategy here that we are so unaware of. Like maybe if somebody like depending on the number of squares that are first out before the first hotel chain is formed, like I can imagine you get a bunch of kind of scattered blocks of hotels or these uh like lots of tiles without a formed hotel being two or more blocks next to each other, and then all of a sudden they start like toppling really fast, and predicting which one is gonna be where, and there's probably a whole bunch of math to it that we are unaware of, but for that casual, we had fun, and for the casual uh acquire fan, uh, I think we we did pretty well. I think I had a great time playing this one.

SPEAKER_00: 17:02

Yeah, uh as did I.

SPEAKER_01: 17:03

Yeah, I I will keep my eye out for a potentially used copy, or uh yeah, maybe I'll keep my eye out for acquire in the future because this one is a cool game that I think anybody could pick up.

SPEAKER_00: 17:17

Yeah, I think if you got people that think board games are Monopoly and even perhaps like Monopoly, I would say you should you should show them this game and be like, you know what? This is you want to you want to have that same feeling of making money and making moves, but with way more agency and interesting interactions, and it actually ends. Um try out acquire.

SPEAKER_01: 17:42

Oh yeah, yeah, this is a great one. Did we do it?

SPEAKER_00: 17:47

We did it.

SPEAKER_01: 17:48

Okay. This has been Acquire by Sid Saxon, published about a thousand times and uh originally designed in 1963. I have been Travis, he has been Clay. This has been Operation Game Night, and we are not a good idea.